Salad Days
by scapegracing1
Summary: This time she finds him below the dripping eaves of a quiet cave, so like the times before except in the details.  Steven/the unnamed female playable character; based on the Emerald game canon.


It's five years the next time they meet. This time she finds him below the dripping eaves of a quiet cave, so like the times before except in the details: the whisper of sun on his hair where it has slipped through the cracks in stone; the color of the shirt (new) over the shape of his shoulders. (his smile is as vague as before but the faint lines around them are new.)

She is tall enough to look him full in the face, never the same awkward teenager who'd lifted her chin in vulnerable defiance, throat bare and secretly drinking in the sight of him. There are legends held in capsules to her belt and power in the flex of her wrists. The places she has been have pressed their stains into her soles: traces of a restless life.

She is still beneath his gaze. She feels like an insect caught in amber; she halts without struggle.

* * *

><p><em>"How tall you have become," he says smilingly.<em>

_Her nervous joy ebbs and quietens; she frowns at the affection in his voice. These are things you say to a child._

* * *

><p>These are the things he does not tell her: that he has thought of her atop hills and in ravines, in caves carved from stone and hidden below rivers, the wind searing his hands and face while she fingerprints his insides. He could pick her out of a crowd from the shape she left on his brain, the flare of scent in his nostrils.<p>

He thought of her in the places he wandered into while chasing rock and legend. In a windless desert in an empty ruin he had found a wisp of long brown hair. It threaded through his fingers like smoke. It slid from his grasp and he never found it again.

* * *

><p>Sometimes she stops by puddles and placid rivers just to look. From the poor angle her own height startles her; somehow, somewhere she has grown without noticing. She wonders if the increased gravity from standing taller above the earth explains the list in her steps on slow days, odd days, days when the cast of the moody sky is the exact shade of his eyes and hair.<p>

Or perhaps her growth isn't true flesh and bone, but air: at times she believes that the space inside her could make a desert.

She is twenty-one and can count the number of nights she spent in her own home on one hand.

* * *

><p><em>"I see you took my gift," he said when she didn't reply.<em>

_"Yes. I - thank you. It was very kind."_

_"No," he says, suddenly, seriously. "It wasn't kind at all."_

_And there he stands before her, mouth unhappy and eyebrows wild, thirteen years older than she and looking for all the world like a lost child. She isn't afraid any longer. Something like hope curls itself into her air spaces; an old friend she hasn't welcomed for a long while._

* * *

><p>Vividly she recalls pushing tentatively into his house that last time. The air had smelt of sea and sand and flowers - agape melliflua *, the kind that didn't bear fruit. She had smiled at his unexpected sentimentality in choosing a flower that didn't make berries, that was, for all intents and purposes, useless; a flower named for love - in Greek, no less.<p>

It was empty.

The door clattered hollowly against the wall while her fingers smoothed over the letter again and again, thinning the stiff sheet, leaving scratches. Then standing outside on a cliff between sea and sky she laughed and laughed. He'd gone soul-searching and left her a Pokemon without a heart.

* * *

><p>He remembers afternoons fading into evenings, the rustle of sea and paper overlaid by a questioning knock on the door. Then the sight of her with the sun behind her, a bold stripe of color beneath the black rim of his reading glasses. After a day spent in the dim study he often has to shield his dilated owl-eyes from the light she brings into the room.<p>

He never asks why or when or how, just opens the door. (He'd always been a clever child, curious but learning early on not to question the truly sacred.) They will pass the rest of daylight in his muted room with the soft glow of sun slanting through the window and the quiet that moves in rhythms: a flick of a page, a sweep of sea-wave, the occasional flutter of her fingertips through her hair. Sometimes the rise and fall of her voice, her laughter a quick, bright thing that fills the room and steals his breath.

She always left by sunset; again, he does not ask why or where to. Mussed and aglow from one rare, perfect evening where he'd found himself laughing silently from places he hadn't known existed inside of him, he will lead her to the door without words: she opened a secret network of wells and springs that bubble with mirth he'd come to let show.

She never said goodbye and he'd never let her; perhaps he should have taken this as a sign.

* * *

><p><em>"Tell me," she says abruptly, "where were you, all these years? I never knew, not even before you left."<em>

_He looks at her strangely. "I didn't know about you, either."_

_It dawns on her that this must be true - they had neither of them known a thing about the other save the few stolen evenings and chance meetings unfurling, it seemed, outside of ordinary time. And yet she knows everything about him: the sides of a mountain and the slant of rock in the grey of his eyes, peaks and edges in their sharpness. The restlessness, the desperation to move in his distance from his father's huge air-conditioned offices and the high ceilings of his cottage; the perch of his room on the edge of stone and sea._

_In this way they are much alike - the need to escape from places in the world that had been carved out for and built into them. And lately they had each been to their share of high, wild places, places with echoes and distance; each astounded by the height and depth of the world, the helplessness, the ache, the loneliness for something they hadn't quite allowed themselves to have._

_Finally she speaks again. "It doesn't matter," she voices, her tone all hush and awe. _

_"No. It doesn't." _

_He smiles straight at her, a real smile of untrimmed yearning. She has never been more glad for her frankly ridiculous height; to be able to look him in the eye is a gift she could never understate. Like a crash of wave in a silent cove she realizes that this is what she has always wanted long before she ever knew: all her life her mother had been a half-widow, waiting at home for a husband too enthralled by the wild and the promise of adventure to stay for more than an apology, a cold meal. He parents had loved each other dearly but never been equals._

_It had taken five years of solitude but now they were - they are - they _could be. _And that is the most beautiful thing in the unspeakably wide world._

(an end.)

* * *

><p>* I made it up, it doesn't exist.<p> 


End file.
